Stephanie Roberts and I hung out at the BlogHer conference, and she recently posted a recording of our conversation on her blog. She asks things people are scared to ask me in person, like how can I keep blogging about my husband? She asks me things no one ever asks, like how do I write a blog post? She also asks stuff people ask all the time that I never have a good answer for, like, how do I manage kids and a career? But this time I have a good answer.
Here’s the link to the interview.
By A.J. Jacobs – For my last book, The Know-It-All, I tried to fill in the huge gaps in my learning by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. I read from A to Z. Or more precisely, from a-ak (East Asian music) to Zywiec (a town in Poland) — a total of 44 million words. Admittedly, there were quite a few slow parts — the 21 pages on Portuguese literature comes to mind — but overall, I learned a tremendous amount of fascinating information. Including lot of great wisdom about jobs and careers. Here, a distillation: Read more
There’s a new guest blogger on Brazen Careerist: A.J. Jacobs. He is an editor-at-large at Esquire, and from what I can tell, it’s one of the cushiest jobs in the world. He doesn’t go to meetings, he seems to have some sort of tenure-track thing where he would never be fired, and he doesn’t even have to write for every issue. Read more
The best questions are not necessarily those that get answers, but those that lead to sharper questions.
My friend Marci Alboher, who writes for the New York Times, often calls me to ask questions about blogging and personal branding. I usually give her strongly opinionated answers and add a little emphasis about how I know that I’m right. Read more
Today’s job market favors employees. The attitude of most workers is that they should have a job that makes them happy. So it’s no surprise that at any given time 70 percent of the workforce is job hunting, according to the Wall St. Journal. Read more
Every generation revolutionizes something, and Generation X is revolutionizing the intersection of family and work. There’s a new emphasis on keeping families together over career aspirations, and it’s what makes me most proud to be a part of Gen X. Read more
Starting a company is cheap enough that you don’t need to raise a lot of money to do it, but you still need to feed yourself. A popular route is the in-between step of being an entrepreneur while still working in a corporate job. Read more
By Ryan Healy – According to Monster.com, 60 percent of college graduates move home with mom and dad after graduation and the trend is on the rise. The statistic holds true with my friends from the class of 2006. More than half moved back to the suburbs to start adult life, much the same way they ended high school life — with their parents. A lot of people say generation Y needs to grow up and take some personal responsibility and that we have been coddled by our helicopter parents (see the comments section). Read more
Back-to-school time isn’t just about your coursework. It’s also about your future.
With that in mind, here are eight steps you can take at the beginning of the college year to lay the groundwork for your career. Follow them and you may just do justice to the amount of time you spend sitting in a classroom. Read more
The last time I wrote about losing weight was right after I had a baby and my agent told me that I would kill my career if I went on speaking engagements. “You look terrible” is what she told me. And I lost forty pounds in two months. Read more
penelope@penelopetrunk.com